The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Cloud services may be rendered through dynamic infrastructure provisioning. For example, within a relatively static hardware pool, operating systems and applications may be deployed and reconfigured to meet dynamic customer computational demands. Within a cloud environment's boundaries, images may be installed and overwritten, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses may be modified, and real and virtual processors may be allocated to meet changing business needs. Challenges may exist, however, in providing an infrastructure that is capable of modifying its resource allocation plan/protocol in response to changing demands.